Pure Luck is a vegan restaurant located on the hip strip of Heliotrope, across from the Bike Kitchen and Scoops Gelato. Serving a mixed menu with Mexican and Asian touches, the kitchen's claim to fame is their use of jackfruit as a meat substitute.
Visits: 5
Andrew Says: This should be my favorite restaurant. I love vegan food, and this spot is in bicycle heaven, with L.A's best gelato across the street. This is my restaurant, dammit! But sadly, this is not my restaurant. First off (because it's the first thing you'll notice), the service is awful. Not rude, just slow. So slow that you will get tired of waiting for your food, and enter a grumpy state where you are no longer hungry, just eager to get on with your night. If you plan on eating here, give yourself at least an hour, if not longer.
The menu items that I like, I really like. The potato pal appetizer is a huge guilty pleasure. Deep-fried gnocci, sprinkled with black pepper and served with a tangy BBQ-ish dipping sauce. I also enjoyed the BBQ sandwich, with jackfruit replacing pork. Even though the sandwich wasn't hot, and the sauce was nothing to get excited about, it was tasty and sloppy in the way a BBQ sandwich should be.
When things go wrong, they go really wrong. The noodle bowl is a cold, sad excuse for an Asian dish, and always arrives with a good inch of water in the bottom. You may think about returning it, but the thought of another 3o minute wait will quell that impulse. On a recent visit they were out of the jackfruit (the reason I stopped in) as well as the homemade lemonade. The jackfruit I can understand, but out of lemonade? That means you're out of lemons, sugar or water, and those can be easily replenished, perhaps by the waitress idly sipping a coca-cola by the window?
Again, I want to like Pure Luck, I want something to click here, but I guess not all luck is the good kind.
Natalie says: Ugh. I want to like Pure Luck. I really do. But, as one reviewer on Yelp wrote, the only good thing about Pure Luck is its proximity to Scoops, the gelato restaurant across the street (which, by the way, has vegan gelato for those of you who prefer your frozen desserts that way). My first meal at Pure Luck was a flavorless tofu pesto sandwich. The pesto was bland, and the tofu was pan fried, but lacking any spices. My second meal was even worse: an "avocado" salad that was worse than anything I'd make for myself, and I would have been embarassed to serve it to anyone else. It had about four slices of avocado on it, pico de gallo, some bruised romaine leaves, some pumpkin seeds, and an unidentifiably flavored salad dressing drizzled on top. It sounds like a semi-boring salad, but wait! This salad was floating in water. I imagine that the cook forgot to dry off the lettuce before putting it on the plate, but it was hard to fish the pumpkin seeds out of the salad water and also maintain a healthy appetite. Good thing Scoops has such hefty servings of amazing gelato (black sesame cheesecake!!). The food was bad and the service was comparably bad. We waited much too long for our water, and an insane amount of time for our food (two cold salads). I did enjoy the deep-fried gnocchi, but I would bet a pound of jackfruit that the gnocchi is not homemade. The dipping sauce for the gnocchi is veganaise mixed with BBQ sauce, both of which come out of some sort of industrial size container. I would've prefered a garlic pesto dipping sauce, or some sort of fancy balsamic reduction, but those don't normally come in plastic bottles.
I don't know why people like Pure Luck, but this place gets lots of rave reviews from vegans and meat eaters alike. I would rather eat at any number of other vegan restaurants than Pure Luck (see Bulan below).
Overall: 2/5
Veg Friendly: As friendly as it gets.
Dog Friendly: There is no outdoor seating.
Cost: Lunch for two with lemonade, $25
